"tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Interviewed by Kent Bye February 16, 2002E.V.": I've been preoccupied with creating fresh contexts for creativity since at least 1975 when I was 21. This led to my creating neologisms to explain myself & my activities. Since then, I've declared myself a "Homonymphonemiac", a neologism I've coined to combine "homonymns" + "nymphomaniac" + "phonemes" to mean a person who obsessively 'gets off' on making puns. In 1975, I also built what is still, as of 2019, one of my main 'sculptures': the "Frame of Reference" puppet theater. I imagined that by the time I'd get to my 40s my ideas would be so abstruse & original that they'd be more or less incomprehensible to most people. The idea was for the FoR to be my puppet theater media outlet for public relations rendering myself more comprehensible to the general public. There was more than a little ironic humor involved in that. In 2001, Kent Bye approached me about making a documentary about me. We worked on it together for about 7 months after which Kent decided not to finish the doc because it was too complex. He'd wanted to make a single-issue documentary about me as a political activist but shooting footage of me & being exposed to my life revealed far more than that. I proposed that he make it about me as a free thinker but he rejected that idea. This interview was shot by Kent on February 16, 2002, as part of his then documentary-in-progress. After he gave up on the project, Kent gave me copies of all his footage at my request. Every rare once-in-awhile I pick something from this footage to use in something. In this case, I was glad to find the interview & to augment it with a slide show of mine & footage of the FoR — along with other material. This intervew, perhaps more than any other I've ever given, gets into some of the ideas that're most important to me &, IMO, is entertaining (or, as some people might say, "irritaining") to boot. — June 13, 2019E.V. notes from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
